One of the most frustrating things I’ve encountered while working with WordPress came a few versions ago when they decided it was a good idea to ‘clean up’ the editing interface by hiding most of the post meta box options.

“Streamlined Writing Interface – new users of WordPress will find the write screen much less cluttered than before, as more of the options are hidden by default. You can click on Screen Options in the top right to bring them back.”

CUSTOM POST TYPES
These were poorly named. Think: Custom Content Types. That is, non-post content. Examples: employees, products, attachments, menu items, pages, pets. If you want it to show up in your site’s main RSS feed, then it’s probably not a custom post type.

POST FORMATS
A Post Format is a formatting designation made to a post. For example, a post could be a short “aside,” or a Kottke.org-style link post, or a video post, or a photo gallery post. The data you input might be slightly different — video post should contain a video, an aside should probably not be very long, a link post should have a link. And the way that the post is displayed on the site might be very different — an aside will typically be displayed without a title, a link post may have the title point to the link. A video post may be wider, or have social sharing buttons auto-appended. But they’re all still posts. They still show up in your feed, and you still find them in the Posts section of the WordPress backend.

If Twitter’s CSS framework Bootstrap actually catches on, it will go a long way to unite the web and let us move on to more important problems.

Much like how jQuery has turned knowing JavaScript into just having to know a certain level of JavaScript, Bootstrap will be a common foundation for everyone writing CSS.

So, for example, you could have a bland WordPress theme that is written on a foundation of Bootstrap (eager to see how this goes.) that users could customize with a separate css file that is loaded after.

With tools like Bootstrap, our time spent on startup that used to take the first three or five hours of a project may now be up and running in five minutes. Which is good, because we’ll need that extra time to deal with Responsive Design/Development.